OBITUARIES : Frank Drozak; President of Seafarers Union

Frank Drozak, president of the 80,000-member Seafarers International Union since 1980 and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, has died at his home here of brain cancer, labor officials said Monday.

Drozak, 60, who had been hospitalized several times in the last 18 months for cancer treatments, died Saturday.

He had remained active in the union despite his illness, just last fall lobbying for legislation that would have required 11 Kuwaiti tankers operating under the U.S. flag in the Persian Gulf to be manned by American crews.

Congress passed the measure. But the Reagan Administration, citing national security interests, used an exemption in it to allow the reflagged tankers to be staffed mostly with Filipino crews who are paid about one-fourth of the $30,000 to $35,000 annual wage of U.S. ship employees.

Drozak assumed leadership of the Seafarers Union at a time when its membership was suffering large layoffs because of an over-abundance of ships, new technologies that reduced the size of crews and a large decline in the size of the U.S. merchant fleet.

Of the union’s 14,000 deep-sea sailors, only about 7,000 now hold active jobs, according to union officials.

Drozak worked his way up the union’s hierarchy in the 1950s and ‘60s, first as an organizer in Mobile, Ala., and then as a port agent in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

He was elected a vice president of the union in 1965 and put in charge of its contracts covering the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Great Lakes and inland waterways in 1972.

In 1980, Drozak was elected to succeed Paul Hall as the Seafarers’ president and also as head of the 44-union AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department.

A year later, he was named an AFL-CIO vice president and appointed to one of the 35 seats on the labor federation’s policy-making executive council.